He spent $150K on brand before he had a product—then closed $1.5M ARR in 1 month. | Niklas Lindgren, Co-Founder & CEO of Endra

Niklas Lindgren (00:00:00) : We do almost the same pitch to him. Like, this is the problem, this is how you work, this is what the engineers globally today are producing and this is the way they get there. And he said almost the same thing. This is incredible, if we can solve ten percent of this, this will be a generation of companies. It didn't have a fraction of the feature set that we have today, but they understood the concept of this and it was almost like a dream coming true for them. Because they spent so much time on tasks. They have to move data from this program to this program and it's almost like a copy paste. They spent so much time doing that simply because these systems are not interconnected with each other and don't talk to each other. So we raised a $4 million pre seed, $20 million seed, and then we raised our Series A in June of this year, and that was a $50 million round. And, we closed a million and a half in January alone. And that was all enterprise revenue, which was a very strong signal that the global industry would want to do this. We were also closing the deals with some of the most important logos from very early on. Previous Guests (00:01:05) : That's product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I called it the product market fit question. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I mean, the name of the show is Product Market Fit. Pablo Srugo (00:01:17) : Do you think the Product Market Fit Show, has product market fit? Because if you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take out your phone. You have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders and it lets us get better guests, thank you. Niklas, welcome to the show, man. Niklas Lindgren (00:01:34) : Thank you for having me. Pablo Srugo (00:01:35) : It's an interesting time right now, because a lot of companies are raising massive rounds, massive Series A's. You raised $50 million from A16Z not too long ago but a month, two months ago. But also a lot of companies are not able to raise. I think it's still about fifteen, twenty percent of companies that actually raise an A, but the ones who do are very big. That said, in your case, you're probably 3x the median, because the median A even there is $15 million. It's still, it's a big A no matter kind of how you slice and dice it. So we'll get to that and kind of how that all happened, why that all happened. Let's start where we always start, which is the product market fit moment. You mentioned that I think shortly after launch, it was January 26th. So we're talking only six, seven months ago, you closed a million and a half of ARR in a month. Take me to that time, what was happening? How do you make that happen? Niklas Lindgren (00:02:23) : So we started having commercial discussions with our customers. We mostly work in the enterprise space, so we work with large MEP engineering consultancies. So we started approaching them in late 2025, and we told them about what work we're doing. No one had any clue about what our brand was and who we were as sort of a company. So we had to start telling our story early on. We did that in very creative ways, not only through the conventional ones but we were out on Reddit. We did outbound to a lot of these engineers at these firms to try to get inside them and tell them about the work that we did. And we got in there maybe December 2025, and they were very excited about the work we did. Then we started our first pilots early January '26, that very fast converted into signed contracts end of January '26 and so that was the moment that we felt that, oh, holy shit, this could really, really be something. And we closed a million and a half in January alone. And that was all enterprise revenue, which was obviously a very strong signal that the global industry would want to do this, because we were also closing the deals with some of the most important logos from very early on. Pablo Srugo (00:03:44) : How many customers, like one million and a half over how many customers? Niklas Lindgren (00:03:47) : So at that time I think our ACV was around three hundred something. So we were targeting the main customers in the Nordics at the time and also for the UK. Pablo Srugo (00:03:58) : How do you get yourself in a position so early on to have four or five large enterprise customers? That's very rare. Many companies move up market, but let's take those out. There's the companies that say, I'm going to be an enterprise company and I'm going to start selling enterprise. I've rarely seen them be able to have more than one or two pilots in those early phases until they ramp up, go to market, and then it's a different beast. But how did you put yourself in that position? Niklas Lindgren (00:04:22) : It's mission critical for our customers to get this right, and if one of their competitors get this right, and are able to roll out this type of technology. It's incredibly powerful in the market because you can start winning contracts over your competitors. Because you can deliver your work much faster, you can deliver your work much better at a cheaper price point, right? So as the global leaders started to understand, oh, holy shit. My number one competitor is doing work with these guys and it actually seems to work, and they're doing successful pilots. They wanted to speak with us and then once we got into them. We could show them that this technology actually does work and that it will have a lot of impact on their business, and show them the ROI from this. That was how it spread in the early days, only word of mouth, except from the work that we did in terms of outbound but mostly it started outbound. But then today it's still almost word of mouth and very organically. Pablo Srugo (00:05:19) : So it was, if this works, you cannot have it. That's kind of the nature of the beast here. Niklas Lindgren (00:05:24) : Yeah, exactly. They have thousands, tens of thousands of engineers across the globe that are working to do this work and then we're offering them a platform that just does this work much, much faster, does it better. It's a way for them to do much more as engineers so they can start offering new type of products to their customers. They can deliver their work much faster and it's very similar. And many people in this audience probably know what's been going on in legal AI with Harvey and Legora. This is almost the exact same thing, but for an engineering workflow. Pablo Srugo (00:06:02) : Yeah, tell me a bit. I was going to ask, what does Endra do? Tell me a bit about that world. Niklas Lindgren (00:06:04) : Yeah, so we are in the physical world. More specifically, we work with buildings and how we design the technical systems that go into buildings. And the technical systems inside buildings are mechanical or HVAC systems, electrical systems or plumbing systems. It's basically everything that you have inside a modern building that's not the structure of the building or the actual building itself, or the architecture. Pablo Srugo (00:06:29) : So not like the architecture, more the engineering. Niklas Lindgren (00:06:31) : So we power the engineers that are working to design the HVAC systems and the cooling systems of all buildings, and the power systems. And as buildings get much more complex, all owners want to have their buildings run much leaner and less power and there are so many modern requirements on how buildings should work. These type of engineers are just increasing globally because buildings get much more complicated to run. So we build Endra for these type of engineers, so they can work much faster. Today they work in one tool that's called Revit. It was built in '97, acquired by Autodesk in 2002. Nothing had happened since and then. So that's the core platform they work on, and then they have four or five other tools that are all siloed in their tool stack. What Endra does is that we bundle all of this into one platform and then we can run agents to have agents create the design for them. And the end result of all this is that it goes incredibly much faster. The results are based in physics and simulation, and in a much better way than whatever is done today. So that is high level what we do at Endra and the industry that we work in. This is a very large industry. It's only for the consultancies that are designing these systems. That's a $150 billion industry and the MEP equipment market, which is all the equipment that gets installed in buildings. It's almost a trillion dollar market. It's an incredibly large space. Pablo Srugo (00:08:01) : What does MEP, what does that stand for by the way? Niklas Lindgren (00:08:03) : MEP stands for Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing. So those are the main systems that get installed into buildings and if you look at a data center, for example. That's like, they're ninety percent agree, that's an MEP box, basically. So you have cooling systems, you have electrical systems, and you have a lot of mechanical systems that sit inside that. Pablo Srugo (00:08:22) : Tell me about your background, what you did before this and I'm curious how you end up in the space. Niklas Lindgren (00:08:27) : I was in law school, and then I went two years in law school. I kind of understood that I wasn't becoming the best lawyer in the world. I didn't really love going to law school, so I thought that was a bit boring. I started a company in 2014, with my childhood friend Anton. Who is also a co founder in Endra. Pablo Srugo (00:08:47) : And where were you based when you started this? Niklas Lindgren (00:08:48) : In Stockholm, in Sweden. Pablo Srugo (00:08:50) : Okay. Niklas Lindgren (00:08:51) : So we both were in law school, thought that was a bit boring. Started a company almost as a side hustle that ended up that we scaled that company. That was a design build integrator and contractor for security systems. So we were part of building enterprise level security systems for data centers and logistics like, warehouses and enterprise office campuses around the world. But this started very small in Stockholm. We started doing small system installs of CCTV cameras to iPhone repair shops, but we ended up building very, very large enterprise systems. Pablo Srugo (00:09:27) : But this is what? You bought off the shelf stuff, you just figured out enough to make it happen, or did you or Anton have a little background here? Niklas Lindgren (00:09:33) : So there's a long story of this, which I won't give you all to. Because then we'll sit here for a very long time, but Anton lived in China before, and so he got connected to some people in Beijing that were connected to a CCTV manufacturer called Dahua. Which at the time was completely unknown in the northern region or in Europe overall and we were the first integrator or distributor of that in the Nordic region. And now it's almost a market standard in northern Europe. But at the time, no one knew about us. We got the opportunity to first work as a distributor and then we started to install ourselves. And then we grew that business over the course of eight years into a substantial size alternative to companies like Securitas or Convergent. Pablo Srugo (00:10:21) : How big did this business get? Like revenue or employee wise, whatever you can share? Niklas Lindgren (00:10:24) : So we were around $15, $20 million in revenue and then we sold it to a private equity firm. Pablo Srugo (00:10:32) : Gotcha. Niklas Lindgren (00:10:32) : In 2022, so we did our first exit when we were 26 or something. Pablo Srugo (00:10:37) : It's an interesting one, because it's not like, obviously it's not venture massive whatever. But you bootstrapped it, you know, you put a multiple on that twenty and you divide by two, and it's a massive payday. Niklas Lindgren (00:10:46) : Yeah, exactly. That was sort of my business school years that I never got. But it was really good. I'm very glad that we bootstrapped it and that we got really good understanding of how money flows. How to build an organization from first principles and I think many people that are starting companies in the VC space early on. Don't really understand what a million dollars or two million dollars actually are, and then we got to learn that the hard way. We almost got bankrupt so many times. We put in all our personal savings and took on an incredible amount of risk early on in our lives. If I could re deal with some of the decisions, I probably would have done. But the outcome was great. Pablo Srugo (00:11:34) : And what happens after? You sell it in 2022, do you stay there for a bit? Because you didn't start Endra until end of 2024 or early 2025. Niklas Lindgren (00:11:41) : Exactly, so we stayed there until end of '24. So the segue into Endra is that we had a big design team in this venture that was building all of our designs for ourselves in Endra. So once we were installing a security system, we needed a design team that built the drawings for this and the schematics, and all the calculations behind it. Pablo Srugo (00:12:01) : Same way as you would need for the other stuff, like the HVAC system, the plumbing, et cetera. Niklas Lindgren (00:12:06) : Exactly, it's just different systems, right? Pablo Srugo (00:12:07) : OK. Niklas Lindgren (00:12:08) : So my dad is an architect and he said like, if you guys want to have a proper impact on how these buildings are designed in this world. You shouldn't focus too much on security systems, you should focus on the large stuff that are being installed in the core of all buildings. So we did and that was sort of how we found our way into this world. Pablo Srugo (00:12:06) : And you started this with Anton as well? Same co-founder? Niklas Lindgren (00:12:06) : Yeah, so I started with Anton that I started my first business with, and then I had a friend from ten years back whose name was Gustav. And Gustav at the time was working at Goldman Sachs in Stockholm. He was part of a startup that got acquired by Goldman. So he was at Goldman building autonomous trading systems as a developer or engineer. So I called him, he was one of the smartest guys that I knew and I said, we think we have something here. We showed him the actual workflows of how you, like, what are the state of the art in how you design and engineer technical systems to buildings? How does these processes work? And he was blown away. He asked us questions like, how did the global engineering community and the global engineering industry accept this as standard? Why haven't someone done anything about this before? And those were sort of the right questions, because those were the questions that we had as well. So we almost verified our thesis a little bit. But he said, I will join as a co founder but I have one requirement and that requirement is that I can bring on a fourth co founder. His name is David, and my other requirement is that he's becoming CTO. So we got connected with David. We had never met David before, but he had been working with Gustav in Goldman Sachs for many years. Pablo Srugo (00:13:50) : And when is this, by the way? Timeline wise? Niklas Lindgren (00:13:52) : Timeline wise, this is summer of '24. Pablo Srugo (00:13:57) : So you're still working at the other business. You're starting to think about this at the same time. Niklas Lindgren (00:13:59) : Exactly and then we're meeting with David, we had lunch, we do almost the same pitch to him. This is the problem, this is how you work, this is what the engineers globally today are producing in terms of schematics, drawings, et cetera. And this is the way they get there. And he said almost the same thing, this is incredible. If we can solve ten percent of this, this will be a generational company. So David at the time was working on Goldman Sachs' algorithm team. So the team that builds the actual algorithms for how Goldman Sachs trades autonomously across the globe. So when Goldman Sachs takes a billion dollar autonomous purchasing decision, that sort of is the team that builds the math behind that and he was part of taking Goldman from place number seventeen to number two behind Morgan Stanley. And then he resigned. This is in, I think this is in 2023, or something. Early 2023, and everyone asked him, what are you doing? Because no one resigns really from that type of thing, right? So everyone thought that he was going to Morgan Stanley in New York or in London. And he said, no, no, no, I'm just going to sort of figure out what this GPT-3 is about and figure out what this new technology shift is all about. What he did was that he spent a year building his own LLM from CUDA level up to the chat interface. Got it to work, got approached by a lot of VCs to go fund this into an actual company in a lab and he rejected that, and took on a consultancy job instead. He was sort of very non-VC in the beginning. Now, obviously, three rounds after, he's sort of all happy now. But in the beginning, he was sort of against the whole VC trend of this industry and took on a consulting job. And in that time, we approached him. Pablo Srugo (00:15:56) : I think you're making the point of just how important the team is. You've got all these pieces of the puzzle that you're adding on. The four co founders, which is not normal but if everybody's playing a specific role, they have a clear reason to be there. It can drastically affect the odds of success. We're actually going to talk later about, because you carried that through to hiring not just the first four co founders, but the first thirty or forty employees. You had a hiring principles manual. You went outbound. So we're going to talk deeply about how you did that. But I would love to go, you had an insane 2025, at least according to Crunchbase. You raised $3 million, let's say mid '25, raised $20 million near the end of '25. So obviously a lot of stuff was happening. Then January 2026, we know it was a PMF moment where you signed a million and a half in a month, right? So I'd love to go as deeply as possible into everything that came before that. Everybody wants to end up in that place where they just have that banner year. The fundraising is part of it, but definitely the signing that muc., A million or two million, you sign in a short time frame. A month is exceptional, but even if people could do it in a year. I think a lot of founders will be happy. But all of that has to do with what comes before it. So you're talking about, mid 2024, you're doing some work. Let's say on the side on this idea. What is that work? What are you doing? What are you spending your time on? Niklas Lindgren (00:17:11) : Oh, wow, we did a lot of things and I think that is the overall answer to it. You need to, like we tried a lot of things. What we really wanted to get to is, how are we building this product? Because there is an industry standard where everyone works on and we didn't want to replicate whatever went on that. Because everyone just hated it. So we wanted to get into something new. Pablo Srugo (00:17:35) : What is that standard, by the way? Just maybe not super deep, a little bit of context? Niklas Lindgren (00:17:38) : That standard is everyone works on one platform called Revit. Like lawyers work in Word, these engineers work in a platform called Revit. Lawyers don't hate Word, but there's a lot of engineers across the globe that hate Revit, because it's so legacy. It was, as I said, built in '97. It's not back compatible with Word. It's not a modern software. We wanted to understand early on, what are we building? How should a five star user experience be? And being just a four man team, none of us being the actual ICP ourselves, we needed to get out and speak with users. So that's what we did early on. We wanted to speak to as many potential users as possible and we did this on. I think most of our conversations early on were on Reddit, with DMs on Reddit, in MEP engineering threads. Pablo Srugo (00:18:31) : And you got them on calls or are you mainly, literally mainly online? Niklas Lindgren (00:18:35) : We got some of them on calls, and then we got some of them just chatting back and forth, asking them questions to verify different types of ideas or concepts or things like that. We did that really early on '25, like spring of '25, and then we had something that you could look at in the summer of 25. Like an actual product, right? Very prototype, but still something like a user interface you could actually look at and once we started showing that to users. Like, how it could work. It didn't have like a fraction of the feature set that we have today or a fraction of sort of the features that you needed in order to launch it. But they understood the concept of this and it was almost like a dream coming true for them. Because they spend so much time on tasks now that are just bullshit tasks. They have to move data from this program to this program and it's almost a copy paste type of task. And they spend so much time doing that simply because the systems are not interconnected with each other, and don't talk to each other. To give you an understanding of this, like if you're building a hospital today. You have engineers that are manually placing each and every unit that. When you walk into the hospital, each and every unit that you see has been placed in a 3D model before going in there. So every individual needs to place each and every receptacle, each and every lighting fixture, each and every lighting switch inside this hospital. And these are tens of thousands of units. And then once that is done, they need to calculate how many receptacles do I have and then they need to ingest that into an Excel file to then calculate like how much load do I have on this panel. And once I know how much load I have on this panel, I need to start calculating in another software how much metal is needed inside these cables and it's levels of complexity. And so once I saw that, oh shit, we can have an agentic experience where this is generating the design and I almost have a vibe coding experience. Where I can set my playbooks, I can set my constraints and I can give a context window to. And have Endra just build this system for me instead, and then I can start reviewing them. Pablo Srugo (00:20:47) : In this case, add the fixtures for me. Like you tell it more or less, hey, this is the number or this is the spacing or these are the constraints and it kind of just does it. Niklas Lindgren (00:20:54) : Exactly like that. Pablo Srugo (00:20:55) : OK. Niklas Lindgren (00:20:56) : When engineers are starting to say like, holy shit. I know because they gave us their models that they previously completed. So once you saw like, once I ingest this into Endra, it's not perfect but it comes to eighty, ninety percent of whatever I did before and I spent four hundred hours doing this project. Endra created this for me in under ten minutes. Pablo Srugo (00:21:15) : This is an interesting point to draw on because a lot of the AI output is eighty, ninety percent. In some cases, eighty nine percent is almost as good as zero. It saves you no time because then you have to review, you double check, blah blah blah, and you're like, oh my god. But in this case, the eighty to ninety percent really was eighty to ninety percent. I just, I don't know how that plays out, but maybe you can speak a little bit about that. Niklas Lindgren (00:21:34) : Yeah, definitely and the reason why we're saying eighty, ninety percent is because it goes back to how you design buildings. That's an iterative process. So eighty, ninety percent is one deliverable and it's fine that it's not a hundred percent in that stage. But that's the full deliverable that you charge your customer for and then as design develops, the architect comes up with a new building layout. Which has another room in the left wing or whatever. You sort of iterate, iterate, iterate. There's a lot of time being spent on both, but sort of the greenfield design is usually around eighty percent of then you iterate as design develops into a more and more detailed design. And that, also consumes a whole lot of time and that goes much, much faster once you do it in Endra. Because you don't need to do that in five, six different point solutions. Pablo Srugo (00:22:22) : You're going into an industry you don't know that much about. You've experienced a subset of your problem yourself before. So that kind of pulled you in that direction and then as you said, your dad maybe pulled you more in that direction but you're not an expert in the space. How much work do you do up front, and how do you do that work to get to really know your ICP? Because it's one thing to deliver one feature, like the feature you just mentioned. Which is happening everywhere with AI automating things. My experience is, in many cases, for some subtlety that you missed, it doesn't land and you don't get the pull that you thought you would have given the amount of time saving. Obviously, you did get it. So I'm curious, how much work did you do up front and how did you do the work to really understand your ICP at that kind of detailed level? Niklas Lindgren (00:23:00) : We did a lot of work. We tried to scope everything down. So in our early days of product, we still have that philosophy, but we're trying to scope everything down to something viable. One point of value that we can deliver to the customers is good. We should like, let's just focus on one workflow inside Endra and do that extremely well. And I think that we nailed that early on to focus on. I'm not sure if it was three or four different workflows that they can do end to end at Endra and it actually worked. I think a lot of companies are getting very wide too fast in terms of their product offering and then, you know, you're not doing anything very good. That was sort of something that we did very good early on that we focused on, on three or four core workflows that we did extremely well. Pablo Srugo (00:23:52) : And did you do a lot of interviews, you know, structured or not, to know that these workflows. It's not just one or two people that are doing things like this. Everybody does things in this exact workflow sort of thing? Niklas Lindgren (00:24:02) : Early days, we didn't have a thousand interviews. We had kind of few, but they were very similar to each other and they were kind of from the same ICP, which was from large MEP consultancies. So we took a bet at the end of the day. Because we didn't have the resources to do a very big research on the industry and we definitely didn't have the time in order to map out the full industry and the full aspects of what should we build. We needed to get something out fast and we nailed those for the first one. Pablo Srugo (00:24:39) : You love this show. You don't want to miss the next episode. Why would you? So hit that follow button. Trust me, it's in your own best interest. And the other question then is, because you're going workflow by workflow. How do you think about getting somebody out of status quo? Oftentimes when you're replacing a platform that is so embedded and so old. The upside is it's easy for you to create a 10x better experience on some workflow like you did. Relatively easy, but it's hard for you to create enough of the features that they can actually say, okay, I'm going to get rid of this and I'm going to go into Endra. How did you kind of bridge that gap? Niklas Lindgren (00:25:13) : We bridged it very easily through integrating natively with the legacy players. As Legora and Harvey integrate natively into Word, we did the exact same thing. So the user who works in Endra, whatever work is being done there is perfectly possible to just translate into these older platforms. Pablo Srugo (00:25:33) : So it was never a replace, it was just add this on top. Like, hey, you're doing this thing, it's taking you X number hours. Do it in our system instead, and then you just integrate it back just like you used to. Niklas Lindgren (00:25:41) : Exactly, exactly. So the end result they're getting is the same one as if they were to use us. The design team of fifty people, but you know, you can do it from one person and you can do it much faster, and you can do much better. Pablo Srugo (00:25:55) : Walk me through the fundraising history. How long did you bootstrap for? When did you raise the first money and how? Niklas Lindgren (00:26:02) : So me and Anton invested money at inception. So we needed some money to get off. We wanted to build a very strong brand. So that was the reason why me and Anton invested $300/$400K, something, in the sort of at inception. Then we used that cash for something like six months and then we were discussing internally, should we bootstrap this or should we go raise VC money. David, as I said before, was sort of, he wanted to bootstrap this and not go raise VC money. We were like, yeah, but you know, there could be a big upside doing so as well. We can probably accelerate a lot of the work that we do much faster and so we did. And we raised a pre seed in, I think that was in April or May. I don't remember really, of 2025, a bit over a year ago. Then we raised our pre seed with Nordskan, a Swedish fund and then we raised our seed, as you said, in December of 2025. So we raised a $4 million pre seed, $20 million seed, and then we raised our Series A here in June, of this year and that was a $50 million round. Pablo Srugo (00:27:17) : I mean, out of those, the one that really shines the most is the $20 million seed. A median seed is like $4 million. You're at this point still pre launch, I believe. How does that $20 million seed happen? Niklas Lindgren (00:27:30) : That $20 million seed happens because we had a waitlist at the time and the global engineering industry started to really understand the work that we did. That somehow, the VC community somehow got that information and there was a lot of interest to go lead that seed round. And from our standpoint, we understood at the seed level that this is going to transform how we design buildings. It's just a matter of when. I think that also came to the minds of the venture capitalists of the world, that this is probably something extremely big and something extremely meaningful for a very large industry. And this is just the early days. Pablo Srugo (00:28:20) : Did that come inbound or did you do a process for that? Niklas Lindgren (00:28:23) : No, no, no, we have never done a process. None of the rounds has been a process. Pablo Srugo (00:28:28) : Do you have a sense of what you've done in order to generate so much inbound from VCs? Niklas Lindgren (00:28:33) : I have gotten that question many times and I don't really have a really good answer to it. We have never focused on that. They just happen naturally, very naturally to us. I think it's a mix of this founding team, the very large opportunity in this industry, the fact that we are still the only player in this space. Meaning that there is some extremely large market to capture. We're first, and we are obviously, for that reason as well, the best funded and it's a market that not a lot of people are thinking about exists. So I think that has been a mix of the actual team, the founding team and the early team that we hired. The market size, the opportunity, the sort of how this industry works, and as well, what our customers are saying. Our seed investor, Notion, they said that they had never had so good customer interviews as they had once they did the homework on us and I think they did twenty or thirty user interviews. And then they did a lot of homework as well, because obviously a $20 million round in seed that's, you know, from by the way. From like a $300 million fund. Pablo Srugo (00:29:47) : Wow! That's a bet, yeah, yeah, OK. Niklas Lindgren (00:29:49) : The partner there, Cam, I know when he wrote to his IC. Because I've seen the screenshot of it, he said that if there is one company that I will bet my whole career on. That this is, this is probably. Pablo Srugo (00:30:00) : He effectively is, right? Niklas Lindgren (00:30:01) : Yeah, so. Pablo Srugo (00:30:02) : That's a good bet. Niklas Lindgren (00:30:03) : But yeah, it was a good bet, right? So, he's thinking, I hope he's happy. Pablo Srugo (00:30:06) : Maybe two follow up questions on that. The first one is, you seem to find a massive space, right? This speaks to what you were saying, $20 million seed. Because of how big the impact could be and this is the thing that drives most VCs. At the end of the day is massive, massive markets. Most of them though are competitive, right? You look at law and you look at Harvey and Lagora, I mean, and these are companies that have been around for several years at this point. You kind of come into it, you're the only player. You got there by serendipity, as one often does but looking back and thinking back. And imagine you're talking to a founder who's thinking about the next idea, do you have a sense of what it takes to find? It's one thing to find a niche space nobody touches, but then it's like, okay, you're in a tiny little space. To find a big problem that nobody's yet addressed, what kind of has to happen for that? Niklas Lindgren (00:30:52) : I think it's hard to just, you know, find something. I think you sort of need to be curious. You need to sort of dip your toe into something because then you can understand sort of how that relates to something else. So looking back at myself, we started in the security industry. which is, you know, part of the construction industry at some point. So we installed these systems inside buildings that were being built, inside data centers that were being built and so on. But we didn't do MAP, but that was also getting installed inside buildings. But the reason we did that, we understood that this is a big one and with them we wanted to do something more meaningful in this space. But I think it's hard to just fall into something, you need to dip your toe into something and then find another way around it. But that's probably part of why this is an interesting case, because not a lot of people have went into this market and understood that this is a gigantic opportunity to transform how we design buildings in the world. And that's like, if we solve that, that's obviously a gigantic outcome. But more on a high level, I think currently the market and many of the VCs of the world want to. They think all services industries that can turn into SaaS companies or AI companies is something that's very interesting and I think the wind is blowing in that direction. So if there's another founder out there listening, I think maybe that's something that you should find. Like. where is there a services industry anywhere in the world that's running on very old systems or is very labor heavy. What can you do there? I think that would be sort of a more of a higher level guidance. Pablo Srugo (00:32:29) : I mean, I think the other thing, just to learn from your experience. Something that I've always believed is, I mean if you land on an idea that's massive, that's great. But if you don't, you know, look at your first company, right? Your first company was nothing, let's say, sexy and also nothing that was going to become a trillion dollar company, right? Even a multi billion dollar company, but it could become a big success and at least relative. And certainly relative to you as a first time founder in the 20s, right? So, part of it is, like you said, dip your toes, getting into something that is, for whatever reason, interesting to you. Where there's team market fit, regardless of whether it can become a unicorn. What that might imply for you, not just in that first company but moving forward, is hard to kind of predict up front. But as long as you get something out of it, it could be a win. Niklas Lindgren (00:33:10) : Exactly, and I think investors also understand the entrepreneurs that they are working with, like who are these persons. I think a lot of entrepreneurs don't think that VCs don't understand that, but they do understand who they work with and my appetite for risk is very high. I try to control, for controlled risk, it's very high. My appetite to sort of build something meaningful is extremely high. I'm not in this business to be number two or number three. Even though we're still the only player in this field, I'm sort of very, very hungry to win and to dominate in this space, and dominate by orders of magnitude in this space. I think that's also a factor, whatever you get your ass into make sure to win, make sure to not be number two, number three, number four, number five. Because vertical software doesn't really work that way. The power laws are not in your favor if you aim to be number two or three. So I think it's a matter of that as well, like whatever you get into, make sure that you're creating the category winner and that you are the category. The one who is the best in the world of this is Jensen Huang. He creates his own industries and for natural reasons he wins them as well. So, we try to be, I'm not sure if it's too bold to say that we're trying to be a little bit Jensen here. Trying to create a new type of industry. Pablo Srugo (00:34:36) : Well, that's a good segue. Because we have two tech players I want to talk about. One of them is brand and using Reddit but you spent, you said, $300,000, $400,000 on building a brand at inception. Which is not a thing that you normally do. Normally you go out, you get customers, MVP, you prove value, and then later on you kind of, increase everything with brand and investing in brand. What did you spend those first few hundred thousand dollars on, and why did you choose to spend on brand early? Niklas Lindgren (00:35:00) : Yeah, I'm almost embarrassed of saying that, but yeah. It turned out well, so I'm not embarrassed anymore. But in the early days, it was really weird. It sort of went against all early stage playbooks of how you should do things. I think YC even have an advice, like don't spend any money on marketing early on or something like that, or a website or something. But we went straight against that. We spent a lot of money on brand, on storytelling, on marketing. Pablo Srugo (00:35:00) : How much would you say you spent, in those first few quarters? Niklas Lindgren (00:35:00) : I think we spent maybe $150 something, $150k something. So building the first web, building the first sort of visuals and motion around the product, like before there is almost anything. And the reason why that was really good was that we got in touch with a lot of engineers that were excited about sort of the, at the time, fictional work that we were doing. But we could almost get them to sort of get a packaged feeling of what we were trying to create. More importantly, they can understand who we were as a company, what we stood for and our core values, and sort of who we were. We got an identity for those $150k and that was very, very important for us and it's paid off multiple times after. Pablo Srugo (00:36:22) : What would you say is the most, out of all. Because I'm sure you've tried different things. What were some of the most impactful brand assets that you built and why? Niklas Lindgren (00:36:29) : I would say the website, definitely the website. Pablo Srugo (00:36:29) : Did you outsource that? Niklas Lindgren (00:36:29) : We did, so there was a great creative agency in Stockholm called EW. They've been doing work for us. I think they did Legora after us, they did Sana. Pablo Srugo (00:36:46) : And what did they get right? I mean, regardless of whether somebody uses EW or not. They're like, okay, I'm gonna spend time, effort. Maybe I have $150k, maybe I don't, on my website. What did they get so right about your website? Niklas Lindgren (00:36:56) : So they got the story right. It doesn't really look like it does today, but early on it was more sort of scaled down and then we would be telling a story about the work that we did, why we did it, and they did this, in a very nice and compelling way. And they got that extremely right. And then we also produced product trailers for them. They were part of designing our first user interface before, you know, we almost had a product. So they helped us also on product user interface. So it was sort of very aligned with whatever we communicated on the website and in the other marketing assets that we were producing. And they were great, they were incredible. Really, really incredible, a small agency in Stockholm, EW is the name. Pablo Srugo (00:37:37) : So what would you recommend to someone who's thinking about investing in brand, whether they're going to hire a consultant or not. When you think about they got the story right. What's behind that? What do you have to do to get a story right? What does a good story look like? Niklas Lindgren (00:37:47) : It's a good story always, to some extent. It has a start, a middle part and a finish, right? And we did kind of that as well. We were trying to explain to the industry, what is the current state? How are you guys working today? How are we planning to fix this? And what does the future of this industry look like and how you design buildings, right? So that was sort of what we were trying to create with these marketing assets, to create the storytelling around why are we doing this and what problems are we trying to solve. And the website, and all of the other assets that we created was instrumental in doing so. So people started believing in the work that we did. They were very excited about the work that we did and that's also how we got into very, very intimate discussions with the ICP early on as well. Because they frankly believed in the mission and the work that we did. Pablo Srugo (00:38:44) : How did you drive traffic? Because you have a website, it's great. How do you get people to actually see it? Niklas Lindgren (00:38:47) : It was all word of mouth for us. So it was all driven by people telling other people and we had a wait list that we put out early on. Pablo Srugo (00:38:47) : But how did you kickstart that word of mouth? Niklas Lindgren (00:38:47) : We were commenting on threads on Reddit and doing a bit of sort of shadow marketing. I know you shouldn't do that, by the way, on Reddit but we did early on in some threads. That was how we kickstarted it. Pablo Srugo (00:39:11) : You found that worked then? You made Reddit worked for you? Niklas Lindgren (00:39:13) : Yeah, Reddit worked really well for us to get into a user base. To get into the decision maker was a bit trickier. Those were not on Reddit, but to get into the early users of this was definitely very good on Reddit and yeah, that was sort of how we kickstarted it. Then it was, you know, very organic from there and then, it just grew and grew, and grew over time. Various sort of big voices in this industry started recognizing us as a company. They posted about us on LinkedIn and so our LinkedIn followers grew as well. And then, we started posting on LinkedIn and we got them sort of to understand the work that we did. So that was how we started early on and also, sort of how these assets helped us tell the story and tell sort of the industry about the work that we did. Pablo Srugo (00:40:01) : And then moving to the second tactical area, you had a hiring principles document really early on. You used outbound on LinkedIn. Tell me a little bit about the hiring strategy. Niklas Lindgren (00:40:10) : I think we set up these hiring principles after we were ten or eleven people and those have been incredibly important for us to navigate ourselves in hiring the first fifty people at least. Pablo Srugo (00:40:26) : What are some of those principles are that, for example. Niklas Lindgren (00:40:29) : Some of those principles are that, for example, you should be a talent magnet, and if we are recruiting you. What other people are coming with you and it doesn't necessarily have to be that you're having multiple people with you but we want you to at least have access to other people. Because that signals that people want to work with you and that you're a good person, right? Then we have something that we call energy in, energy out and we want to have a net energy in from a person that sits in the room. And then we have, I think, ten total that we screen for and those guide us in how we hire people, and screen for people as well. Pablo Srugo (00:41:10) : How do you screen for that? For example, the talent magnet one. Niklas Lindgren (00:41:13) : The talent magnet one is, so we don't screen for all of the ten. We screen for three or four of them and then we figure out the rest as the process goes. But we have a battery of questions, we leave a lot of the room to the talent that we're interviewing. We always ask them to tell their story, from early on. I always ask that question, like if you're applying for a role at Endra. I would ask you, Pablo, can you help me, tell me your story, from early on. Who were you as a child and who were you as a teenager and how are you getting into this position that you're having today. That we're sitting in this room and once someone starts talking from early days, and talking about their whole life, both personal and professional. As they tell you about their life, you can find very many different interesting points to screen for. Pablo Srugo (00:42:11) : I've always liked the life story as an interview guide. I know that Shopify was famous for doing that and once you draw that trend line. It gets a lot easier to make out who's exceptional and who isn't. Niklas Lindgren (00:42:22) : Exactly, and you can also very easily understand, is this person someone that does incredible things? Because they can go very deep on the details on how they do things and why things work, why they don't work, where they failed and what failed. And so those are the type of things that we screen very much for. And also a lot of personal things in terms of how did they grow up? What type of environment was that? As I said, who are they as teenagers? What type of sports do they do? There's a lot of different things that we screen for, and we screen everything in order to make sure that we can check box all these ten hiring principles. Because everyone needs to pass those hiring principles. Otherwise, they don't get hired. Pablo Srugo (00:43:07) : And then the last question is just related to hiring. You used outbound a lot, a lot of LinkedIn outbound. Tell me what you did there, and just kind of a little bit of a playbook that somebody else could replicate. Niklas Lindgren (00:43:17) : We did it very easy. We said, what type of persons are we looking for? What is a relevant background for this role that we're now hiring for? And obviously that's very different if you're a developer or if you're go to marketer or if you work in marketing or whatever. But we set up, this is the background we think that we are looking for and then we just try to find individuals with that type of relevant background on LinkedIn. And I did a lot of the outreach as well as two other colleagues of mine. And the founders did all the outbound on LinkedIn, like regular, just adding, connecting with a message like, hey, I'm Niklas. Pablo Srugo (00:43:52) : Any learned secret other than volume or whatever? Any anything you learned from doing that firsthand, or is it just do it? Niklas Lindgren (00:43:58) : Just do it. There's no magic behind it. Just do it and in order to get, like, obviously it's much easier once you're like thirty, forty, forty five, fifty. You can start using these individuals' networks because you have screened for them to have other great talent in their network, right? So it organically evolves and gets much easier as you get more people inside your company that believes in your mission, and believes in you, and believes in the team. But I think a critical number is to get to the first fifty people that way and then you can start leveraging other people's networks and brands. Like even their personal brands, because if you're hiring really good people. They have probably a lot of other people that want to follow them. Pablo Srugo (00:44:44) : Perfect, well, last question. What would be a top piece of advice that you find yourself giving to other early stage founders? Niklas Lindgren (00:44:50) : Talk to your customers like hell and try to get every piece of information you can from them. Then once you get all of this information into your brain, you can start triangulating around that and making assumptions. You can start drawing conclusions and stuff like that. But you need to get a lot of information from your customers early on and do that in the most creative ways possible. I did it on Reddit, I did it on cold calling, emailing, going through contacts, whatever and the critical part is to do that early on, and get into these rooms early on. So do that as much as fucking possible. Pablo Srugo (00:45:35) : Perfect, Niklas. Thanks so much for jumping on the show, man. It's been great. Niklas Lindgren (00:45:37) : Thank you, Pablo. It's been great, thank you for having me. Pablo Srugo (00:45:40) : So picture this, it's months from now, years from now and one of your founder friends. A really close founder friend of yours, guess what? Their startup went bankrupt and it turns out, if you had just shared the Product Market Fit show with them. They would have learned everything they needed to, to find Product Market Fit and to create a huge success. But instead, their startup has completely failed. You have blood on your hands. Don't let that happen. You don't want to live like that, it is terrible. So do what you need to do. Tell them about the show. Send it to them. Put it on WhatsApp. Put it on Slack. Put it where you need to put it. Just make sure they know about it and they check it out.